The Android Invasion Is Here

Last month, Google introduced the Nexus 7, a 7-inch tablet built by Asus featuring some fairly impressive specs, including a 1.3 GHz Tegra 3 processor, a 215 PPI screen, and 8GB of NAND storage. If you didn’t quite get all of that, that’s totally fine, because the spec Google really wants you to care about is price.

The Nexus 7 hits that magical $199 price point that worked wonders for the Kindle Fire just a few months ago. And if the suspicions of Engadget’s Tim Stevens, and others around the web, are correct and Google’s launching a so-called “race to the bottom”, one can only expect prices to drop on Android hardware. Unlike Microsoft, who’s trying to beat Apple at its own game (and price point), Google’s plan seems to be to

But what does that mean for you? Perhaps most importantly, it heralds a proliferation of tablet-sized devices running the latest Android operating system. A Nexus 7 isn’t significantly more expensive than a high-end graphing calculator, so it seems reasonable to expect tablets being pushed into markets and scenarios nobody could have ever expected.

Of course, that’s going to require new and innovative apps, so there’s never been a better time to develop for Android. Android is already a dominant player in the mobile computing space, but due to severe fragmentation, it’s believed only a small fraction of the apps in the Google Play market are actually designed for a tablet interface, leaving a serious competitive gap. Make sure your content is ready for the Android tablet invasion !